Marvel’s Joe Quesada Disappointed In Man Of Steel, Says It Made Zod The Hero

by Joe Comicbook | April 27, 2014

In an appearance on Kevin Smith’s Fat Man on Batman podcast, Marvel Entertainment’s Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada weighed in with his thoughts on the competition’s Man Of Steel, which rebooted the Superman franchise.

When talking about how Captain America dealt with his adversary in Captain America: The Winter Soldier in comparison to Superman dealing with Zod in Man of Steel, Quesada joked, “He could have broken Bucky’s neck. I’m sorry. I had to get it in there.”

Quesada also added that comparison was something that someone had pointed out to him in an online article.

“As a comic book fan, I wanted to love that movie so much,” said Quesada. “I wanted to love it so much, and I didn’t love it so much. Again, there are little things here and there that you could pick at and things like that, but I just think at the end of the day, Zod was the hero of the movie to me.”

Quesada added, “Zod, in this particular incarnation, struck me as not necessarily an evil man, but a man of…he had a particular…he had his orders, he had a mission. He was a zealot of sorts, but he was a zealot…again, correct me if I’m wrong… but he didn’t say, ‘I want to rebuild Krypton, and then come back and destroy this little planet. All I want is to rebuild this planet. And the only reason I’m blowing everything to bits here is because you’ve got what I want, and you’re not giving it to me. So please, give me my people, and I’ll leave.”

When Kevin Smith interjected that Zod forced Superman to make a choice that it was either going to be Krypton or Earth, Quesada replied, “When Superman said Krypton had its chance, I was like, ‘Will you just f***ing kill him Zod?’”

Quesada felt that Superman was abandoning his own race in the film, and there could have been a solution where Superman could have given Zod what he wanted, so Zod could have rebuilt Krypton elsewhere. However, Smith countered that even if Superman had given Zod some of his blood that Zod would have eventually come back and wiped out Earth.

Quesada replied, “You probably could have written a way around it. You could have had a better solution if you had written a better problem. So I see things like that, and I’m like, ‘Aww, man.’ It was one of some things in the movie, that I just ended up feeling disappointed in it.”

Quesada pointed out that he didn’t get that feeling with the Batman movies and that he loved the Batman movies.

“I was in the mood to watch that Superman movie, and afterwards I was just angry,” said Quesada.